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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Camille Bond

To Feed Astronauts Safely in Space, NASA is Learning To Monitor The Spaceship’s Microbiome

To support astronauts on longer-duration missions farther away from Earth, NASA needs to figure out how to provide them with a continuous supply of nutritious food. The freeze-dried foods astronauts currently eat won’t cut it, as key nutrients in these meals gradually break down.

The Vegetable Production System, or Veggie, is one potential solution to that problem. Veggie is a suitcase-sized system used to grow plants onboard the International Space Station. It has produced three types of lettuce so far, and NASA researchers determined that one variety (red romaine) was as nutritious as its Earth-grown equivalent. A challenge for the Agency as it moves forward with the system will be to control onboard microbial contamination.

Image: Fungi gathered from Veggie system aboard Space Station, incubated to promote growth. Source: NASA

The International Space Station and other space vessels are sensitive environments. Bacteria and fungi that get carried onboard by incoming astronauts are generally non-threatening, but the wrong strain or a burst of growth could endanger the crew’s health or compromise critical equipment. NASA keeps a constant eye on microbial conditions in the space station — and in particular, the Agency is closely monitoring patterns of microbial growth on the Veggie system.

“If the crew consumes food contaminated with pathogenic organisms, they could become ill,” NASA Senior Scientist Dr. Cherie Oubre said in an Agency press release. “Or, if plant growth systems become contaminated with plant pathogens, the crops could be compromised or fail. To prepare, we must assess Veggie’s vulnerabilities and carefully monitor it.”

Astronauts on board the space station contribute to the Veggie monitoring project by swabbing different components of the system, incubating any microbes they’ve picked up on growth media slides, and then analyzing and making a record of the organisms that have colonized the slides.

Sampling began in 2019 and is ongoing. By creating a record of microbial activity through time, NASA researchers will be able to analyze growth patterns, and respond to potential problems in future plant production system designs.

Technologies developed by NASA have found applications in industries on Earth in the past. Design adaptations that the Agency develops to ward off contamination in the Veggie system could eventually prove useful in emerging food tech spaces like indoor farming and cultivated meat production.

BentoBox Survey: Restaurants & Their Customers Embrace Direct Online Ordering

It’s clear that the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way restaurants do business. As a purveyor of online marketing and commerce solutions for the hospitality industry, New York-based company BentoBox recently decided to quantify some of those changes.

BentoBox saw a jump in business during the pandemic, with more restaurants seeking the online tools that the company offers. The team used data from that growing customer base to understand how the pandemic has reshaped the food industry since March 2020—and what might be next for restaurants.

“We mined all our data to see what it says about what’s going on in the market,” BentoBox’s Chief Marketing Officer Darcy Kurtz told The Spoon in a recent Zoom interview. “That’s been especially important these last couple of years, because things are shifting so quickly, and so dramatically.”

One of the biggest themes in the data was a rise in costs for restaurants, reflected in price increases on restaurants’ online menus. “The food itself is costing more, labor is costing significantly more when you can even get it, and real estate costs are significantly higher,” Kurtz said. And for restaurants, which operated on thin margins even before the pandemic, those price increases can sting.

One way to combat rising costs is by switching to the ghost kitchen model–and BentoBox saw a 100% increase in the number of ghost kitchens using its software platform this year, according to the company’s recently published report. The ghost kitchen model also has a relatively low cost of entry, allowing new restaurants to launch more easily without the need for heavy investment.

BentoBox’s pool of restaurant customers has grown by almost 60% since March 2020. Kurtz attributed that boom in business to a new emphasis on the importance of restaurants’ virtual experiences. “Today, your digital presence is really your front door,” Kurtz said. That’s especially true for ghost kitchens, which rely completely on their online presences to get discovered.

The majority of the company’s growth was driven by increased sales of online ordering tools. Before the pandemic, many restaurants didn’t have direct online ordering functions on their own websites, instead relying on third-party platforms like GrubHub and Uber Eats.

“But when COVID hit and there was only one way of getting revenue, restaurants added their own online ordering paths in droves,” Kurtz said. And diners have responded: According to the report, BentoBox found a 54% year-over-year increase in direct online order volume. The company also noted a 200% increase in restaurants’ monthly revenue through digital loyalty programs.

Kurtz said that loyalty to local restaurants drove these trends: “People have learned that third party ordering apps take a lot of money from their favorite restaurants. So once their favorite restaurants got online ordering, customers said ‘oh, I’ll just go direct because I know that’s best for my local restaurants.’”

With the Omicron variant rearing its head, there’s no way to be certain of how in-person restaurant business will recover in the near future. But BentoBox’s data is clear on one thing: Online ordering is here to stay.

“What we’re finding is that people are just eating out more. They’re still doing online ordering—and they’re doing it all week, not just on the weekends,” Kurtz said. “They found out how convenient it is, and they found out that delivery food can still taste great. So I think for restaurants, the great news is that there are new revenue streams and the total available market of diners has grown.”

But Kurtz predicted that restaurants may struggle to support that expanded business model in an ecosystem where labor is scarcer and inputs cost more.

Because the pandemic has shifted the rhythm of delivery demand, restaurants will also have to adapt to a new schedule. “The fact that Fridays haven’t rebounded is a signal that the hybrid work model is going to have an effect on the operational cadence of these restaurants,” Kurtz said. “Especially with restaurants that are in business districts, they’re really going to have to figure out how to shift their operations, because it’s not going to be a steady five-day-a-week sort of operation.”

With restaurants’ online presence growing in importance, we’re likely to see more growth for commerce and marketing solutions companies like BentoBox. And in turn, that growth should provide more consolidated data on the new shape that the industry is taking.

Tofurky and the Plant Based Foods Association Are Challenging an Oklahoma Plant-Based Labeling Law

The Animal Legal Defense Fund filed a complaint this month against an Oklahoma plant-based labeling law on behalf of Tofurky and the Plant Based Foods Association.

It’s not the first time Tofurky and the Fund have teamed up to challenge plant-based labeling legislation: In the last couple of years, they’ve also filed suits in Louisiana and Arkansas. But there’s something different about the Oklahoma law—and that difference could make it trickier for plant-based producers to challenge.

Starting in 2018, a handful of U.S. states passed laws that restrict plant-based producers from using certain terms on their product labels. Missouri, the first state to pass such a law, attached fines and potential jail sentences to the use of the word “meat” on non-conventional product labels.

Laws like this have a chilling effect on the plant-based industry, Tofurky’s president and CEO Jaime Athos told The Spoon in a recent Zoom interview. “The specters of potential lawsuits and litigation—especially when you look at what the damages could amount to—can really influence people’s decision-making,” he said.

The laws only apply in individual states, and the inconsistencies in labeling requirements from one state to the next can make interstate commerce for plant-based products unfeasible. It would be prohibitively expensive for many smaller companies to change their labels nationwide, and impossible or impractical to develop separate labels for separate states.

On paper, the rationale behind the laws has to do with something called consumer confusion: The idea that if plant-based producers are allowed to use terms like “meat” and burger,” unwitting consumers will be tricked into buying their products.

But Athos pointed out that plant-based meat products like Tofurky’s have been around for decades. People today are familiar with the use of terms like “veggie burger” to describe plant-based products, he said—and those terms can actually help consumers to understand how to use a new product.

As one of the older players in the plant-based space, Tofurky has stepped up to pursue multiple challenges against different states’ labeling laws. “I think a lot of the confidence to take the fight on comes from being in the business for a long time,” Athos said. “We can see the absurdity of being told that we have to change the names of our products, which people have eaten millions and millions of iterations of without any confusion or complaint for decades now. I think it does put us in a different frame of mind than a newer company would have.”

Tofurky and other groups have challenged speech bans under the First Amendment, arguing that they unfairly prohibit truthful commercial speech. And because the U.S. places a strong value on free speech, it takes a lot to defend a speech restriction, according to Amanda Howell, who is a senior staff attorney at the Animal Legal Defense Fund.

“If the law is a complete ban on speech, the defendants have to show that that law is serving a substantial government interest,” Howell said—and that there’s no alternative to banning speech that could also serve that government interest.

Tofurky and the Animal Legal Defense Fund have had some success in challenging labeling laws under the First Amendment. Last year, a federal court granted an injunction to Tofurky in an Arkansas case, halting the enforcement of that state’s labeling law. “The court said we were likely to win with a First Amendment challenge, because the law is unconstitutionally restrictive,” Howell said.

Oklahoma’s Meat Consumer Protection Act was passed last year to fanfare from the state’s cattlemen’s association, which described the law as one of its “lead priorities” in a press release. It’s safe to say that industry interests influenced the law: One of the legislators who introduced it has won the Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association’s highest award.

None of the Oklahoma state legislators who sponsored the law responded to The Spoon’s requests for comment.

The Meat Consumer Protection Act doesn’t ban the use of certain words outright. Instead, it requires plant-based meat and dairy companies to disclose the vegan or vegetarian nature of their products on their product labels. It also mandates that those disclosure statements be as large and prominent as the names of the products.

To challenge this kind of law under the First Amendment, it would be up to the plaintiff to prove that the legislation isn’t serving a reasonable government interest. Plant-based producer Upton’s Naturals and the Plant Based Foods Association have already tried to challenge the law on First Amendment grounds, but were denied an injunction last year.

Now Tofurky and the Animal Legal Defense Fund have taken over the suit. They’re taking a different approach, arguing that the law is unconstitutional for three key reasons: First, there are already federal laws concerning food product labels, which should take precedence over the state law. Second, the language of the law is vague, which could mean that it gets enforced in an arbitrary, discriminatory way. And third, the law puts a burden on interstate commerce by creating a patchwork of different state laws.

Though Howell was confident about the Fund’s arguments in the case, she expressed concern that the Oklahoma law might set a new precedent for other states. “Legislators may see that these bans on speech are uphill battles, and stop pursuing them because of the burden to show a government interest,” she said. And if that happens, “the next wave of these laws might be disclosure laws like Oklahoma’s, which would create a patchwork.”

While Tofurky and the Plant Based Foods Association pursue the legal challenge, the Association is also working on mounting collective action to discourage legislators from supporting labeling laws in the first place.

The Oklahoma case will likely serve as a signal to other state legislatures. We may see more states pick up disclosure requirements like Oklahoma’s, hoping to discourage challenges. But success for Tofurky could send a message that it just isn’t worth it for states to spend money defending plant-based labeling laws.

Hero Bread Founder Cole Glass Was “Eating Himself To Death.” So He Created This 1g Net Carb Bread.

Imagine a bread roll much like Subway’s Italian white bread: soft, fluffy, carbohydrate-dense. Now imagine if that bread had zero grams of sugar, 12 grams of protein, and only 1 net carbohydrate per serving.

That’s the product that California-based startup Hero Bread recently launched in Subway sandwich restaurants. The company’s foundational tech is a flour alternative developed in founder and CEO Cole Glass’ home kitchen. Earlier this week, I got on the phone with Glass to find out how he created his flour replacer—and tasted Hero Bread’s Italian roll myself.

Due to a rare and severe set of food allergies, Glass eats an extremely limited diet: no raw fruits, vegetables, or nuts. “My diet has been terrible for my whole life because I can only have protein, fat, and carbs. As a kid, it was great that I could ask for a cookie or bag of chips instead of eating carrots and celery sticks,” Glass told me. But as he grew older, he became more aware of the health problems that his diet could provoke.

Glass wanted a way to eat the carbohydrate-dense foods he enjoyed, but to reduce their health impacts. Yet, most of the alternative flour products on grocery store shelves were made from almond, coconut, or cauliflower (all foods he couldn’t eat).

Hero Bread’s Cole Glass

“I had three options,” Glass said. “I could give up flour-based foods forever. I could go back to eating like a five-year-old and literally eat myself to death. Or, for lack of a better term, I could try and science the shit out of the problem, and reinvent flour from the ground up with a set of ingredients I wasn’t allergic to.”

So, though he didn’t have a culinary background, Glass started baking. And after two years of experimentation, he figured out how to use different combinations of isolated proteins and fibers (from common crops like corn, potatoes, wheat, and flax) as the bases for various baked goods.

Glass cold-emailed Mattson, a food laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area, to see what they made of his alternative flour. After they ran some tests and confirmed that he was onto something, he contacted potential investors.

“I’d show up at their offices with a Lululemon bag full of muffins, cookies, and waffles, and a pitch deck on my computer,” Glass said. Silicon Valley VC firm Great Point Ventures became Hero Bread’s first investor, with partner emeritus Ray Lane joining the board of directors. A former CEO of McDonald’s also became an early investor.

Glass also attracted advisors and investors who were involved with alternative meat startups Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. Drawing on their experience, the company decided to launch its first product in partnership with a quick-service restaurant chain. The team started up conversations with potential launch partners, gauging their needs—and found that those conversations kept coming back to bread.

“Bread is the first thing that you think of when you think about something that is super carb-y,” Glass said, “and it’s the most universal platform for us to jump off of.”

As a quick-service chain that sells huge quantities of bread, Subway was an ideal partner. Hero Bread’s Italian rolls were introduced in five U.S. cities (about 300 total restaurant locations) this month, where they’ll be available through January.

When I tried out the Hero Bread roll in my own kitchen, I was surprised at how convincing it looked and felt. It has a thin, golden-brown crust and a super-soft, porous inside. It also has that airy texture of Subway sandwich bread: When you bite into it, your teeth almost melt through it. Toasted, it gets a nice crunch.

The Hero Bread roll smells and tastes similar to the Subway analogue, with the addition of an unfamiliar-but-nice, nutty note, which might come from the milled flaxseed. Overall, I suspect you could serve it in place of a standard-issue sub roll, and no one would be the wiser.

After the limited-time test launch, Glass hopes to expand Hero Bread’s partnership with Subway. The company will also pursue other commercial partnerships in the future and eventually consider direct-to-consumer distribution.

“I wake up every single day feeling some combination of shock, humility, and gratitude that Hero Bread became a company, because I started out just making muffins in my kitchen,” Glass said. But with the startup now up and running, he envisions expanding into “virtually every category you can imagine using flour for. Imagine creating things that look, taste, smell, and feel just like the quote-unquote normal versions—while eliminating net carbs, increasing protein and fiber, and reducing calories.”

Kaffe Bueno Wins $2.8 Million Grant To Build the World’s First Coffee Biorefinery

According to CarbonBrief, coffee has a larger carbon footprint per kilogram than fish, poultry, or pork. At the farming stage, it’s one of the top seven agricultural drivers of global deforestation, according to the World Resources Institute. Then there are emissions associated with processing and transportation. And once coffee grounds end up in landfills, they release methane (a greenhouse gas) as they degrade.

Danish biotech startup Kaffe Bueno wants to make the coffee supply chain more environmentally friendly by giving those used grounds a second life as food, nutraceutical, and personal care ingredients. The company announced this month that it has secured new support for that goal: The team received a $2.8 million grant from the European Innovation Council, which it will use to construct its first—and the world’s first—coffee biorefinery.

Kaffe Bueno partners with a transportation service that collects spent coffee grounds from commercial and industrial businesses. Via a fractionation process, those spent grounds get broken down into different compounds.

The company’s first two products have applications in both the food and personal care industries. There’s KAFFOIL, an oil that can be used as a flavoring agent and preservative; and KAFFIBRE, a gluten-free “coffee flour” that can be used in baked goods, confections, and snacks.

In addition to selling its products directly to manufacturers, Kaffe Bueno offers a private label service with customizable formulations. The company partnered up last year with Danish hotel chain Sinatur Hotel & Konference to collect spent grounds from different hotel locations, and then return them to the hotels in the form of upcycled personal care products.

The Spoon reported last year on Kaffee Bueno’s $1.3 million seed funding round, which the company used to begin scaling up production of its coffee-based products. Now, with the European Innovation Council grant funding and biorefinery construction plans, the company should be on track to unlock further production capacity and seek out new partnerships.

FryAway Turns Your Used Cooking Oil Into a Disposable Solid

When used cooking oil gets poured down the drain, it doesn’t disappear. It ends up in sewer systems, where it congeals. Over time, more oil and other debris amasses, forming blockages called fatbergs—which cost some cities millions of dollars per year to clean up, and can also cause sewer overflows that pollute surrounding waters.

The alternative method for getting rid of cooking oil—pouring it into a plastic container or glass jar, waiting for it to congeal, and then throwing it away—isn’t perfect, either, as it relegates a recyclable container to a landfill.

FryAway offers another solution. The plant-based powder transforms liquid oil into a solid that can be scooped out of the pan or fryer and thrown away. This week, The Spoon joined FryAway’s founder and CEO Laura Lady on Zoom to find out where the idea came from, and how the product works.

The story of FryAway starts with Lady’s own love of cooking. “Not only am I from New Orleans, I’m also a Latina from New Orleans, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that we love fried foods,” she told The Spoon. “I cook a lot at home. I fry a lot. I am guilty of having poured oil down the drain and not really thinking about where it went.”

Lady first learned about fatbergs and sewer overflow through conversations with friends. At one dinner party, a friend brought up a Japanese product that solidified cooking oil, making it easier to throw away. The idea caught Lady’s interest, and after looking into the product, she decided to develop a similar solution for the U.S. market.

Before FryAway, Lady worked in marketing and product development for children’s toys. “I think product development in general is very much about solving problems creatively. When it comes to toys, you’re trying to figure out how to bring a character to life,” she said. In founding FryAway, she carried over that problem-solving experience into the food space. “It was like bringing two universes together—one being my love for building brands and products, and the other being my love for food.”

During the product development process, Lady drew on chemistry knowledge from her undergraduate years. “I started researching, reading, trying to figure out how an oil could be solidified,” she said. “And I came across the process of hydrogenation, where you add hydrogen to a molecule to harden it.”

Hydrogenation is a familiar term because the process is used in the food industry. Margarine, for example, is made by solidifying vegetable oil using hydrogen-rich saltwater. And that’s basically how FryAway works: You stir the product (a hydrogenated fatty acid) into your used cooking oil while it’s still hot, and a reaction occurs between the two, causing the fat to solidify.

“Once the mixture cools down to room temperature, you start seeing that transformation from liquid to a gelatinous form to a waxy, hard substance that can then be tossed in the trash,” Lady said. “As it solidifies, it will also trap all of that gunk and debris that’s left behind when you’re frying, so that all of that comes out of the pan in one easy step.”

Two versions of the product (one for pan frying, and one for deep frying) are available to consumers on the company’s website and via Amazon. The team is mostly relying on word-of-mouth marketing to raise awareness about the product.

While larger commercial kitchens are already required to use oil remediation services and grease traps, there could be applications for FryAway in smaller restaurants and catering operations, Lady said.

The company has plans to launch a third product in early 2022, and after that, Lady will continue to explore other solutions for repurposing used cooking oil. Driving that expansion and exploration is the idea that we all want to take care of our shared infrastructure and environment—but need simple ways to improve our habits. “At the end of the day,” Lady said, “it’s about making life easier for those of us who love to cook.”

Nuritas Raises a $45 Million Series B Round For AI-Powered Peptide Discovery

Ingredients startup Nuritas announced earlier this month that it has completed a $45 million Series B round. The new funding will help the company to expand globally and scale its tech platform for peptide discovery.

Like proteins, peptides are made up of amino acids. But while proteins consist of long chains of amino acids, peptides are smaller and easier for the body to break down. Nuritas uses its artificial intelligence-powered tech platform to look for new, bioactive peptides in familiar food sources. The resulting ingredients are likely to find applications in the next wave of plant-derived nutritional supplements.

After the artificial intelligence platform makes its predictions about useful peptides, the Nuritas team produces them in experimental quantities and performs in vitro, cell-based testing. If that initial testing confirms the platform’s predictions, the team scales up production, and then moves to preclinical and clinical testing phases to understand the peptides’ effects on human health.

Since its founding in 2014, Nuritas has launched PeptiYouth™, an ingredient that the company says improves cellular regeneration to slow visible signs of aging. They’ve also introduced PeptiStrong™, discovered in fava beans, which improves muscle synthesis and reduces muscle loss. The company plans to introduce both products to the market in early 2022.

The team has established partnerships with big food industry names, including Nestle and Mars. They also plan to explore applications for peptide ingredients in the medical food and cosmetics industries.

Nuritas’ Series B round was led by Cleveland Avenue, a Chicago-based venture capital firm and accelerator for food and restaurant tech startups. (Also in Cleveland Avenue’s portfolio are Beyond Meat and Bartesian, the countertop cocktail-mixing robot.) Participants included food and agriculture investors Wheatsheaf Group and Cultivian Sandbox Ventures, and the European Circular Bioeconomy Fund.

“Our new investors bring a wealth of invaluable expertise,” company founder and CEO Dr. Nora Khaldi said in a press release, “and this latest round will help to build our US headquarters, continue to expand our team, scale our platform to discover more life-changing ingredients and accelerate our route to market.”

Last year, The Spoon noted the rise of computational biology startups taking a targeted approach to ingredient discovery. Nuritas currently boasts the largest peptide knowledge base in the world—and with tools like machine learning becoming more and more relevant to food innovation, that invisible infrastructure could position the company to play a big role in the ingredients supply chain of the future.

The Kingfish Company Wants to Lead a Tech Revolution in Aquaculture

Earth’s ocean ecosystems are deteriorating. Wild fish stocks are increasingly vulnerable. And yet by the year 2050, global demand for seafood may have increased by as much as 80%, according to research from the Blue Food Assessment.

The Kingfish Company wants to help satisfy some of that demand while reducing the environmental toll of seafood production. The agtech company launched its first land-based aquaculture production facility in the Netherlands before introducing its flagship line of yellowtail kingfish products in Whole Foods Markets across the U.S. Soon, Kingfish will bring its production operations to the U.S. with a new facility in Maine.

Earlier this week, The Spoon joined Kingfish founding partner and CEO Ohad Maiman on Zoom to find out more about the company’s aquaculture technology and plans for expansion.

Why land-based aquaculture?

Traditional aquaculture has raised global seafood production capacity in recent decades, but alarms have been raised recently about the industry’s environmental impacts. Traditional fish farms can create toxic algal blooms and ocean dead zones; farmed fish can also transmit diseases to already-vulnerable wild populations. In response to these concerns, Washington state banned salmon farming in 2018, and Argentina became the first country to ban the practice this year.

Kingfish aquaculture farm

Traditional aquaculture can’t solve the seafood industry’s supply bottleneck problem, which is why the Kingfish team saw the need for an alternative model. “Thinking about the next 30 years of continued growth in demand for seafood, we saw the need for a technological solution,” Maiman told The Spoon.

Kingfish aims to solve some of the problems of traditional aquaculture, the biggest of which is ocean pollution. In underwater cage farming, animal waste and uneaten feed get released into the surrounding water. In Kingfish’s system, the flow of water is more controlled: Water is cleaned on its way into the system to maintain optimal conditions, and cleaned again on its way out to the sea.

The controlled nature of Kingfish’s farm environment also allows the company to prevent parasites or diseases from entering the system, eliminating the need to administer antibiotics or other medications (another problem of traditional aquaculture).

There’s also the problem of seafood feed: Some traditional aquaculture operations use massive quantities of wild fish to feed their farmed species. The use of lower-grade feed in traditional aquaculture can also lead to less nutritious seafood products. Because Kingfish operates in the premium seafood space, the company can source higher-quality feed options and cut down on marine ingredients—replacing fish meal with insect meal, for example.

Inside a land-based fish farm

It would be counter-intuitive if Kingfish’s land-based aquaculture system involved pulling fish from the sea and ranching them. Instead, the company maintains several broodstocks of yellowtail kingfish on-site, and uses them to sustainably generate new generations of fish.

Kingfish’s system mimics the seasonal light and temperature conditions that the fish would experience in the wild. “When the light lasts longer and the water temperature rises, and they feel it’s spring, they spawn eggs,” Maiman said.

The hatchery and larval rearing phases are key for the company, as there are no commercial sources for yellowtail kingfish fingerlings or eggs. The fish spend about 15 days in this phase, at the end of which they measure about an inch in length. Then they’re transferred to the main system, where they live for up to 11 months.

Juvenile fish at Kingfish aquaculture farm

To slaughter the animals as painlessly as possible, the company uses an electric stunner. “By the time they are harvested, they are stunned,” Maiman said. “They immediately lose consciousness at that moment and then they die in cold water, but no longer feel it.”

At Kingfish’s Netherlands facility, the system that supports the animals throughout their life cycle is run using 100% renewable energy. At the planned facility in Maine, the company anticipates that they’ll be able to source about 50% of their energy from renewables. Kingfish is also seeking out partnerships with new renewables projects in the area, as the company can commit to the long-term offtake that new projects need to take off.

The future of fish farming

As a high-value, import-dependent species, the yellowtail kingfish was an ideal pilot fish for the company. “If you go to Nobu and have yellowtail jalapeno sashimi, it will typically be flown in from Japan or Australia,” Maiman said. “We are the largest local producer in Europe and are working toward doing the same in the U.S.” By offering a domestic source for yellowtail in Europe and North America, the company can both cut the product’s transportation footprint and provide fresher fish.

Kingfish began by addressing demand for yellowtail kingfish from Japanese and Italian restaurants, but the company also sells its products in grocery stores. According to Maiman, the team is aiming for a roughly 50-50 split between sales in restaurants and high-end retail stores.

The company went public in Norway last year, and is using that fundraise to grow its Netherlands production capacity. The team is also working on pre-construction and engineering for the new Jonesport, Maine facility, and scouting out future sites in southern Europe and the West Coast of the U.S.

With this expansion, Kingfish plans to boost its yellowtail kingfish capacity—and, eventually, to begin producing its next fish species. An internal group nicknamed Kingfish X is currently deciding which species that will be. Maiman couldn’t go into detail about which fish are being considered, but he did hint that the team is looking for another import-dependent, high-value species.

The company’s overarching goal is to be at the forefront of a technology-driven paradigm shift in aquaculture. “Within the last year or two, this technology has crossed the rubicon from an experimental to a commercially viable technology,” Maiman said.

“At some point, any new technology becomes less of a mystery—and then it’s the first few companies that have been able to build scale and establish a market position that lead the sector.”

Next Gen Foods Launches TiNDLE Plant-Based Chicken in Amsterdam, Opens Innovation Center in Singapore

Singapore-based startup Next Gen Foods announced last week that its flagship alternative chicken product (named TiNDLE) has touched down in Amsterdam restaurants.

TiNDLE debuted in Singapore in early 2021 before launching in Hong Kong, Macau, Kuala Lumpur, and the UAE. The Amsterdam launch marks the beginning of TiNDLE’s expansion into Europe and beyond: Next Gen plans to introduce the product in Germany, the U.K., and the U.S. next year.

“Amsterdam is a trailblazing city when it comes to food innovation and sustainability on the plate,” company co-founder and CEO Andre Menezes said in a press release emailed to The Spoon. Amsterdam is also a strategic European starting point for Next Gen because the company’s manufacturing operations are located in the Netherlands.

When I met up with Menezes last month to talk about the New York City sneak peek of TiNDLE, he told me that the Next Gen team had been working hand-in-hand with chefs to develop innovative recipes using the product. “Chefs are creative, but they’re also scientists in a way,” Menezes said. Instead of selling TiNDLE to restaurants in a premade shape, he said the team wanted to offer a kind of “Playdoh, or a canvas” that chefs could experiment with.

You can see the results of those partnerships in the range of different dishes that are now on Amsterdam menus—from the buttermilk-fried TiNDLE burger, to the taco with pickled cucumbers, to the roulade with shiitake mushrooms and kimchi. Among the six restaurants now serving TiNDLE are chic brunch spots; a Mexican cocktail bar and eatery; a vegan comfort food cafe; and a self-described chicken rotisserie “guilty pleasure bar.”

And while Next Gen is expanding TiNDLE’s global reach, it’s also investing in research and development for new products. The company announced today that it has partnered with the Food Tech Innovation Centre (FTIC), an accelerator and innovation hub, to establish an R&D facility in Singapore.

“Accelerating the transition to a more sustainable food system will require the ability to not only have commercially scalable products for our consumers, but also be on the cutting edge in terms of food innovation,” Menezes said in a press release shared with The Spoon. “We’re thrilled to be the first tenant and a long-term partner of the Asia Sustainable Foods Platform and A*STAR’s FTIC, where we’ll be able to significantly expand our R&D capabilities to drive new technologies and sustainable solutions.”

Next Gen plans to expand its portfolio of plant-based products at the new R&D center, which is scheduled to open in late 2022. The company plans to accelerate hiring and double its current number of R&D roles. It’ll be interesting to see which alternative protein space the team sets its sights on next: According to the company, it could be an alternative dairy, seafood, or meat product.

COP26 Spotlight: Eagle Genomics and the New Frontier of Microbiome Data

The microbiome is the collective genetic material of all the microorganisms that inhabit an environment, like the human gut or a particular soil. Eagle Genomics, an England-based company, is developing a platform that uses data about that genetic material to drive innovation.

At yesterday’s special COP26 session on nutrition and health (hosted by the U.N. Climate Change Global Innovation Hub) speakers discussed technologies that could help to address food and nutrition challenges while limiting climate change to 1.5 degree Celsius of warming. In his talk at the session, Eagle Genomics CEO Anthony Finbow made a case for microbiome science as a future driver of food system transformation.

“We don’t need to go into space to discover the new frontier,” Finbow said at the session. “We need to look within ourselves and within the soil to really understand how we are going to solve for climate change.”

That new frontier is in the human gut, where trillions of bacteria interact with human epithelial cells, sending signals to each other across a layer of mucus. And it’s in the rhizosphere, the dynamic space around a plant’s roots where microorganisms come to feed on nutrients produced by the plant, and provide protection from pathogens in exchange.

Symbiotic relationships between microbes and larger organisms are fundamental to life as we know it. According to Finbow, the importance of those relationships has long been overlooked. Now, however, “we’re seeing major enterprises across the world acknowledge the contribution of the microbiome and recognize its importance,” Finbow said.

Businesses are now unlocking microbial knowledge to improve human health, create safer products, and grow food crops more sustainably. DayTwo of Israel analyzes individuals’ microbiome data to provide personalized nutrition recommendations. Joyn Bio, a collaboration between Ginkgo Bioworks and Leaps by Bayer, is engineering improved microbial strains that can deliver more nitrogen to plants, cutting down on the need for fertilizers.

Eagle Genomics wants to become a network for businesses like these—as well as farms and research establishments—to collaborate and share data. The company’s cloud software platform uses network science, AI, and causal analysis to analyze microbes and their relationships to each other.

The company is currently working on its Series B raise, which Finbow estimated will amount to $30-50 million. They’ve received contracts from large enterprises for the use of their software platform, and have recently begun offering access to research establishments at a lower price point.

Throughout his presentation, Finbow was optimistic about the potential for microbial science to reconfigure our relationship with the environment and the way we think about human health.

“It is possible, by integrating the way we farm animals and grow plants in a way that nurtures the microecology in the soil, to actually reverse climate change—to actually start to capture more carbon and maintain that carbon within the soil,” Finbow said at the session. “It is possible for us, by engineering the microbiome of animals and ourselves, to live healthier lives and to subsist in a more sustaining environment.”

Brave Robot Launches “Climate Hero” Cake Mix Made With Animal-Free Whey Protein

The Spoon has been following Brave Robot’s animal-free ice cream journey since The Urgent Company launched the dessert brand last year. Since then, the company has introduced ice creams in a range of flavors, from hazelnut chocolate chunk to blueberry pie.

Last month, Brave Robot made its first foray out of the ice cream space to debut its Climate Hero Super Cake mix. The team is using the same cow-free whey protein ingredient that supplanted milk in its ice creams to replace the equivalent of three eggs in each box of the yellow cake mix. With this new offering, Brave Robot is demonstrating the ability of animal-free dairy proteins to mimic an expanding range of indulgent foods.

The Urgent Company was created by Perfect Day, an alternative protein manufacturer that produces real dairy proteins using precision fermentation. (You can check out The Spoon’s in-depth coverage of the company’s protein tech here.) The Urgent Company uses those precision fermented proteins to develop innovative food products, like the Brave Robot brand of desserts.

“The goal of Brave Robot is to raise awareness of the climate challenges we face today in a really fun way that makes it more tangible to make a difference,” Brave Robot’s President August Vega told The Spoon this week in a Zoom interview. The Urgent Company estimates that a pint of Brave Robot ice cream represents 34% less greenhouse gas emissions than a pint of traditional dairy ice cream.

In launching the Climate Hero Super Cake mix, the team wanted to bring that same sustainability innovation to a category that hasn’t changed much in recent years: “The cake aisle in the grocery store has been ripe for disruption,” Vega said. “There hasn’t been a lot of innovation, even in the premium space. And so it was just a natural next step.”

The company’s in-house research and design team spent about six months developing the recipe for the new cake mix. Perfect Day’s animal-free whey protein plays a key role in the formula: The protein ingredient contributes foaming, water binding, and elasticity properties. It helps the cake to rise to the right height as it bakes, and to achieve the right texture.

The Spoon was sold on the texture of Brave Robot ice cream, and according to Vega, the Climate Hero Super Cake recreates conventional cake texture just as accurately. “The whey protein provides the fluffiness, moistness, and tenderness that you would normally get from animal products,” she said. “You’re really not missing animal products at all, which is pretty interesting when you’re looking at baked goods.”

In the new cake mix, the team wanted to create a versatile product that consumers could play with. “The more you can interact with your consumers and have them be creative with your product, the better,” Vega said. “There’s a variety of things that can be done with our cake mix: like over the weekend, I made an apple cake using our mix as the base.”

Brave Robot is promoting the product on Instagram as “a cake mix that makes more than just cake.” The team is also sharing recipes that use the cake mix as a shortcut to baking ambitious desserts—like whoopie pies with vegan vanilla frosting, and peanut butter-swirled brownies.

Along with cutting out the need for animal products, the Climate Hero Super Cake cuts down on single-use plastic packaging: The mix comes in a compostable pouch made from sustainably-sourced wood cellulose and other bio-based resins.

The team is currently focused on direct-to-consumer sales through the Brave Robot website. In the future, Vega said, the team will seek out other distribution channels (including partnerships with retailers) to make the product more widely available.

As for the future of Brave Robot, Vega said we can expect to see further indulgent innovations coming out soon. She couldn’t provide details on exact product categories—just the tantalizing hint that they could be “anything that you can have fun with and have a little moment of indulgence with, all while learning how to be more conscious of natural resources and our planet.”

Researchers Use Bacteria To Transform Plastic Into Edible Protein

In 2018, the equivalent of about 3.5 million dumpster trucks’ worth of plastic waste was produced in the U.S. alone, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The COVID-19 pandemic has compounded the problem, driving increased demand for single-use plastic packaging and personal protective equipment.

Advances in microbiology suggest that bacteria and fungi could someday help us to tackle the problem of plastic waste. A 2020 review of this science identified some microorganisms capable of degrading different plastics (like a bacteria strain—found in the stomach of a waxworm—that can break down polyethylene, the most commonly used plastic polymer).

Two U.S.-based researchers have taken the idea of biological plastic recycling a step further. Not only are they using microorganisms to break down plastics; they’ve created a bio-based process that turns plastic waste into edible protein powder.

Ting Lu and Stephen Techtmann—professors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Michigan Technological University, respectively—collaborated on the process. The researchers are using both naturally occurring and engineered microorganisms to metabolize plastic waste and turn it into food.

This summer, Lu and Techtmann received Merck KGaA’s Future Insight Prize, which recognizes groundbreaking science and tech solutions to humanity’s greatest health, nutrition, and energy problems. The researchers were awarded €1 million for their work. According to a press release from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, they plan to use the funding to make their process entirely bio-based; to boost the nutritional profile of the resulting protein powder; and to adapt the technology to work on a wider range of plastic polymers and other non-edible waste.

“When I first started my own lab at Illinois, I wanted to work on something that’s both intellectually challenging and societally impactful. Food generation is such a topic,” said Lu in the university’s press release. “As bioengineers, we are called to use science and technology in service of humanity by improving human health and nutrition. It’s a real privilege to use my knowledge and to partner with other researchers to tackle harrowing issues.”

Lu and Techtmann’s process brings together the worlds of microorganism-based plastic recycling and food industry precision fermentation. The big question is how the resulting protein powder compares to the products on the shelf today, and whether consumers would opt for a food product derived from plastic.